I still believe in doing things the long, painful, drawn out way, but not as doctrine. Doing things by hand is an educational experience. At first, when I was attempting to recreate the K2 theme in my pages with Notepad, I was learning something about CSS and XHTML. Fiddling with settings to get columns and a decent page layout were time-consuming but fun. That later gave way to copy and pasting template code that I’d much rather prefer to automate. I also lacked an integrated commenting and trackback system, using HaloScan as a crutch. If I wanted to add widgets, well then I’d really have to go to a dynamic content management system. Notepad plus SFTP wouldn’t cut it.

There are many talented and dedicated people who dream of powerful, easy to use, aesthetically appealing, content management systems. Given my experience, they have my utmost respect. And so here I am, standing on the proverbial shoulders of giants. Hopefully useful entries will come out of this.

That doesn’t mean my content management education is at an end. Placing widgets requires a bit of editing to the PHP file. At first I thought it would be as easy as drag and drop using the sidebar editor interface, but those are layout sidebars and don’t correspond to the sidebars that are visually apparent.

I’ll go through some of the old content (admittedly, there’s not much there) and port it over to this journal. As for future direction, I may create a dedicated Skunk Works site to manage my mostly non-existent projects, and the Sketchbook will hold tutorial pages and generally chronicle my musings and misadventures.